Posts

Sometime, the folks in Waukegan hope, the day will come when they won’t have to answer questions for articles like this one. In the 1880s, the city fathers of Waukegan, the seat of Lake County, convinced Congress to fund the creation of Waukegan Harbor as a frankly commercial enterprise. It turned out to be a fine investment. About 40 miles up the lakeshore from downtown Chicago, Waukegan became the only deep-water port between here and Milwaukee; as industry settled there, a town of fewer than 10,000 souls grew to a bustling manufacturing city of better than 50,000....

JANE EYRE It is primarily this factor that makes a modern stage adaptation of Jane Eyre so difficult. Whether inadvertently or not, Calvit’s script glides over the uneasy ramifications of acting upon feelings rather than reason–the cornerstone of Romanticism, open nowadays only to the very rich, the very poor, and the very young–and concentrates on the most durable aspect of Bronte’s novel: the love story between Jane Eyre, an orphan girl and later a governess trapped in a life of genteel poverty and powerlessness, and Edward Rochester, a dissolute second-born son saddled with an insane wife and the bastard child of a youthful indiscretion....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You might want to include this even earlier chapter in the saga: According to Alexander Thom, the late Scottish engineer-turned-archaeoastronomer, the neolithic peoples of western Europe also had an interest in regulating pi. Thom surveyed hundreds of sites in the British Isles and France and claimed that, for many sites, he was able to determine the geometrical layout of rough standing stones to an accuracy of 1 in 1,000....

Newspaperman Gets Serious Some old-timers complain that kids in the news business today have no soul. We hope they’re wrong, but here’s what they mean: journalism is no longer a haven for eccentrics; for inquisitive bohemians in shiny pants with minds full of odd lore. Bohemians, we would add, who have learned to squint at existence with a generous but ironic common sense. And who, we’ll further add, focusing on Dan Tucker, have mastered seven or eight languages and compose music of distinction....

PRELUDE TO A KISS It’s not a new trial. Myths and fairy tales teem with transformations that test or prove love: Beauty comes to prize the prince’s soul within the Beast; the Frog King is redeemed by the trust of a king’s daughter; the Witch in Into the Woods gives up her powers, transforming herself into a much younger woman to win back the love of her daughter Rapunzel. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

This adaptation of Scott Turow’s best-selling novel–about an idealistic prosecutor (Harrison Ford at his best) who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a colleague (Greta Scacchi) with whom he had an adulterous affair–is a top-notch courtroom drama that will keep you guessing if you haven’t read the book; even if you have, it is still a very well crafted story, directed by Alan J. Pakula (Klute, All the President’s Men), who collaborated on the script with Frank Pierson, and effectively shot by Gordon Willis....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The profile of the new program director Peter Dominowski is, on the other hand, peculiar. And it would be comic if it weren’t so damn sad. Mr. Dominowski emerges as an executive in an Ex-Lax firm dedicated to providing soothing, comfortable, folksy “fun” music to wards of geriatric denizens. And his new head announcer is perfectly typecast: Jay Andres, the Liberace of FM voices....

In 1971, when I was attending a local community college, black power and black nationalism were at their peak. These overlapping ideologies had already succeeded in dismantling the rainbow coalition that was the civil rights movement and in placing intellectual blinders on some of the most promising minds in the black community. On campus, a former editor of Muhammad Speaks, the racist Nation of Islam’s newspaper, was working as the college’s black-student adviser, and there was much vocal support among the black student body for the Republic of New Africa, a clandestine organization that advocated the establishment, through armed struggle, of a separate black nation in the southern United States....

There was nothing very unusual about the circumstances that led to the unfortunate meeting of Scott Gravatt, who’d drifted in from Atlanta that day, and Dwayne Thomas and his four friends. Graham Burbank, one of Dwayne’s pals, considers it a credo that the scene takes care of its own. “If a guy comes in from out of town and needs a place to stay, you find him one,” he says. Graham wears round spectacles and has close-cropped, light brown hair....

Lead sentences we never got past, from Earth Day ’90 Chicago: “Environmental journalists, in an act of upping the anti on scientific literacy, have the unique position of bonding the widest variety of subjects…” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Young black males make up only 5 percent of the city’s population but are the victims in 34 percent of the murders,” reports Barnaby Dinges in the Chicago Reporter (February 1990)....

THE DRUNKARD The adapted Drunkard does have stock melodramatic characters and situations. A villain with a cape leads a college man down the “liquid highway to sin and perdition,” making the college man a drunkard and his deserted wife a damsel in distress. When the villain is about to beat the damsel with his cane, the hero, who is the drunkard’s foster brother, comes to the rescue. The story stops when the college man is saved from irredeemable dissipation by the Salvation Army....

THE RELAPSE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Well, Econo-Art has beat everyone to the punch. They’ve realized the dream with The Relapse–a straight Restoration comedy, complete with wigs, stylized vocal technique and movement, and 17th-century costumes. But while Econo-Art does a fine job with it, I still can’t help but ask why. Why would an exciting, innovative theater want to do a silly sex farce with no pertinence to 20th-century values?...

THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In A Streetcar Named Desire, the crux of the action is again the betrayal of a sister: Blanche is committed to an asylum after her sister Stella refuses to acknowledge that Blanche was raped by Stella’s husband, Stanley. In the character of Blanche–with her penchant for illusion and her destructive sexual promiscuity, her unworldly innocence and her cynical, world-weary humor–Williams put elements of both his sister and himself....

In 1990 Judy Marks had the windows on her four-story near-north-side town house outfitted with a set of heavy-duty aluminum security shutters. She intended only to secure her home from break-ins, but she wound up in a costly legal battle with some of her neighbors in the Sutton Place Townhome Association, a walled-in group of 50 town houses on Clark north of Goethe. Marks says she should be allowed to keep her shutters because they’re unobtrusive and don’t hurt anyone....

Making their first North American tour under music director Claudius Traunfellner, this four-year-old virtuoso string orchestra is made up exclusively of extraordinary young graduates of the Vienna Music Academy and the Conservatory of Music of Vienna. As a special touch the second half of the program will be led by British violin sensation Nigel Kennedy, who will play and conduct Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons violin concerti. Kennedy has taken the Vivaldi staple and given it the freshest interpretation the work has had in years, communicating his own sense of time through the music–with elements of jazz and even Hendrix licks–all full of remarkable color and contrast....

The combination seems wrong: Sam Myers is a stolid, nearly blind straight-ahead Mississippi harp veteran, and here he is fronting a band full of hip young cats with rockabilly souls, abrim with Texas licks and jumping all over the blues. But Myers is powerful enough to assert himself over the band’s good-timey aggressiveness, and young Funderburgh is simultaneously one of the most technically dexterous and one of the most tasteful of the current crop of blues guitarists–he builds a solo like a Boy Scout builds a fire, placing notes like burning pieces of kindling atop one another with increasing abandon until it’s finally roaring, hot and glorious but never out of control....

Architectural illustration has recently experienced a revival. The tradition of grand presentation drawings is rooted in the formal education that 19th-century architects received at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux Arts. But that tradition, along with many others, was expunged during the rise and reign of strict modernism as an architectural aesthetic (roughly the 1930s through the 1970s). Illustrations then, if any, mirrored the pure, spare asceticism of the buildings themselves. Today’s architecture is less reticent about its inspiration from the past, and the profession has shown some glee in resuscitating the importance illustrative rendering has in the design of a building....

When a repressed criminal psychologist (Jeff Fahey) loses his right arm in a car accident and it’s replaced by the arm of a mass murderer, he discovers to his horror that his new limb seems to have a will and personality of its own. This provocative and effective thriller, directed by Eric Red (who coscripted and coproduced Near Dark), loses some steam, focus, and coherence in its final reels because of what appears to be clumsy studio recutting, but it’s full of directorial savvy and sharp performances....

There were antiabortion demonstrations the day before Mother’s Day, but I wasn’t aware of them until I heard the commotion outside. They were gradually led into cells around mine. I couldn’t see beyond the walls of my cell, but I could hear other detainees asking them if they were demonstrators. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Someone began singing a hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross” or something....

Dance Company Meets Cash Crisis, Steps Lightly Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The company’s condition began to deteriorate when a three-week tour of Israel planned for November was canceled because of the crisis in the Middle East, thereby depriving the organization of an estimated $15,000 in touring fees. “We didn’t think it was prudent to do the tour,” says Hines. Then the company received word that a couple of grants it had expected to receive in late 1990 would not come through until early 1991....